News

The International Observatory on Participatory Democracy (IOPD) takes a Leading Role in International Research Partnership on Participation and Democracy

We are in the midst of a transformation of democracyone
possibly as revolutionary as the development of the representative, party-based
form of democracy that evolved out of the universal franchise. This
transformation involves hundreds of thousands of new channels of citizen
involvement in government, often outside the more visible politics of electoral
representation, and occurring in most countries of the world.

In light of these fast-moving changes,the IOPD is pleased to report that it is
playing an important role in a new global partnership that has been awarded a
significant grant to support the work of the Participedia Project. The
Participedia Projects primary goals are to map the developing sphere
of participatory democratic innovations; explain why they are developing as
they are; assess their contributions to democracy and good governance;
and transfer
this knowledge back into practice.

The IOPD will play an important
role in this project by focusing contributions on the search of case studies and
institutional contacts.

The 5-year, $2.5M Partnership Grant from the Social Sciences
and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) was awarded to the Centre for
the Study of Democratic Institutions and the Department of Political Science at
the University of British Columbia. The SSHRC Partnership Grant will support
the collaborative work of an extensive community of academic researchers,
students, practitioners of democratic innovations, design and technology
professionals, and others.

The project partners include eight
Canadian universities and seventeen additional universities and
non-governmental organizations representing every continent on the globe. (Please see below for a list of
the project partners. Full lists of the projects collaborators and
co-investigators can be found here.) More than $1M of the
Partnership Grant funds will be split among project partnersto support student research and travel that will
further the students learning, while also advancing Participedias mission.
For their part, the project partners, have collectively pledged an additional
$2M in cash and in-kind contributions to the initiative.

Professor Mark E. Warren, the Harold and Dorrie Merilees
Chair for the Study of Democracy in UBCs Department of Political Science,
co-founded Participedia in 2009 together with Professor Archon Fung, Academic
Dean and Ford Foundation Professor of Democracy and Citizenship at Harvard
Universitys Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation. Warren serves
as Participedias project director and as principal investigator for the SSHRC
Partnership Grant.

Shared online research platforms will make it easy for both
experts and non-experts to gather information. The current beta platform at www.participedia.net
has already facilitated the collection of close to 1,000 entries cataloguing case
examples of participatory politics; the organizations that
design, implement, or support the cases; and the variety of methods
used to guide democratic innovations.

Warren emphasizes the projects ambitious goals, noting that
By organizing hundreds of researchers, the Participedia Project will not only
anchor and strengthen the emerging field of democratic innovations, but also develop
a new model for global collaboration in the social sciences. Expectations for
the Participedia Projects outcomes include:

?innovative research platforms to enable
extensive, decentralized, co-production of knowledge;

?a deep and voluminous common pool of knowledge
about participatory democratic innovations that will support a new generation
of research and practice; and

?global and diverse communities of research and
practice focused on participatory democratic innovations.

Partner organizations include the University of British
Columbia, University of Alberta, Emily Carr University of Art + Design,
InterPARES Trust, McGill University, McMaster University, Université de
Montreal, Simon Fraser University, University
of Toronto, University of Toronto-Scarborough, the Deliberative Democracy
Consortium, Harvard University, the International Observatory on Participatory
Democracy, Nanyang Technological University, the National Coalition for
Dialogue and Deliberation, Peking University, Pennsylvania State University,
Research College / University of Duisburg-Essen, Syracuse University, Tsinghua
University, Universidade de Coimbra, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, University of Bologna, University of
Canberra, University of the Western Cape, University of Westminster, and the
World Bank Institute.